Back in New York, with inessential work, entering the UN building, I was stopped by a headline, ‘Death of Children’s Friend’, Wilfrid’s face staring from the front page. The range of notices was surprising. His confidential reports to the Oval Office, Whitehall, Chatham House, correspondence with his mother’s friend, FDR, work for UNICEF, endowment of children’s hospitals in Damascus and Haifa, a Dutch youth settlement, an Israeli theatre, a forest named after him. Tributes from Einstein, Dag Hammerskold, Linus Pauling, Russell, the Huxley brothers, Hannah Arendt, Mr Spender. His friendship with Simone Weil and Adam von Trott was quoted, his sojourn at Meinnenberg dismissed as a brief interregnum, following participation in preliminaries of the July Plot and threatened arrest. He had been consultant to a Quaker peace and reconstruction mission to West Germany. A formal catalogue of righteous deeds but failing to convey his style, his flavour, save for an account of him in Lausanne, smiling with courteous modesty but also enjoyment, perched on the ornately decorated elephant, mistaken by applauding multitudes not for a maharajah but for a movie star with awesome sexual proclivities.
The appreciations resembled criticism of a painting seen only in postcard reproduction. In traditional German sense, Wilfrid had been an artist, transmitting the incalculable. Had I followed him I could have accomplished more. Yet, immediately, his death gave me less dismay than relief. He had hardened into a principle, moral thermometer, rebuke, his protection genuine, his affection suspect.
What also dissatisfied me were reports of his dying in a car accident, alone, or apparently alone, in a West German side road near the eastern border. Details were unknown or concealed, the accident one of several, insufficiently probed, involving an ex-communist Viennese banker, an adviser to the Bonn cabinet and former Stasi chief, a Tallinn-born actor, outspoken Estonian nationalist, shot in his Ottawa garden.
Very soon I moved to Canada, private misgivings subsumed by new duties, faces, landscapes. The country sheltered considerable Estonian communities, where my pamphlets were known, my reception was friendly, though later fluctuating. In Quebec, a French-Canadian historian, whose salary was afterwards shown to be supplemented by Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and his Californian neo-Nazi publisher, assured me that the Katyn murders had been a hoax, pre-war Estonia a Red hotbed, the Holocaust a Jewish propagandist distortion of regrettable deaths from typhus and Churchill-induced food shortages. Students heard in puzzling silence his insistence that Auschwitz casualties were because of faulty application of a gas disinfectant prescribed by League of Nations health regulations, my own pamphlet a disgrace of truth. No one objected, though eyes turned on me in reproach or accusation. Anne Frank’s diary was, he continued, a recognized forgery, his own book, Unimpeachable Witness, was being filmed in East Germany.
Restoring my morale, UNESCO commissioned a book, Secret Protocol, based on my pamphlets and broadcasts, centred on the origins of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and its aftermath. This gave me purpose, sometimes excitement and anger, unworthy of an objective historian, though lack of such feelings would make a curious human being. I could still be astonished by suave, blackmailing diplomacy, the push from the balcony or faked suicide, Field-Marshal von Manstein’s refusal to join the July Plot, from inability to believe his troops’ excesses in Russia.
Further attempts to focus the Herr General were unsuccessful, though instances of sardonic comedy were plentiful. A pre-war Baltic minister, accused of assisting Nazis, boasting of being on Beria’s Black List of those sufficiently important to receive immediate execution, was aggrieved when acquitted, his status being too lowly. Thousands of dollars were spent tracking a Soviet formula, H.I.S. Moderation, a misreading of the dossier of a Kiev agro-chemist, suspect for his moderation.
My book, devoid of poetic verve, planted no words like landmines, dissolving barriers between myth and observation, politics and vision. Designed like an ugly brick, cheaply printed without index, it attracted numerous reviews, respectful, neutral, and venomous, and quickly disappeared. Under pressure rigorous, anonymous, the editors made crucial excisions. One such was an account of Günther Reinmeer, SS Divisional Commander of Treblinka death-squads. Arrested, 1945, he was allowed recruitment, for technology, in the USA, renamed Hans-Georg Wagner. Posing as Jewish, he worked in Venezuela for an Iberian cartel under US management as industrial spy before the CIA dispatched him to Berlin, to shadow fellow ex-Nazis, before retiring to Jerusalem, marrying an Israeli, and with the pension due to a Treblinka survivor. I had added a photo of him at a UN reception, surrounded by respectful statesmen.
I retained no copies of Secret Protocol. Much of it rapidly sickened me. I could never believe, like the young Josef Goebbels, that politics was the miraculous impossible.
I was invited to the Monterey Pop Festival, permitted to meet Jimi Hendrix, before lecturing to a European Studies Department, with its seven students. Despite the more varied work, I watched my concern for contemporary Estonia slowly wilt, only Kitchen Talk expanding, like tiny Japanese pellets changed by water to brilliant insects and petals.
Recalled to London, I found much changed. Alex was again roving abroad, the twins feeble characters in an imaginary book, unreviewed, long remaindered, though plaguing me for failing the responsibilities of friendship. In the Embassy, I fancied myself supernumerary amongst new faces; Mr Tortoise had retired, the Miscellany was abandoned, the building itself shabbier, the establishment penurious. BBC and news editors ignored me, my request to interview Albert Speer, released from Spandau, brusquely refused.
Whitehall continued to embargo an official memorial to the Katyn dead. On the anniversary of the Pact, the European Parliament passed a resolution supporting the illegally occupied Baltic States, the world sighed and went its way. The émigré Estonian National Unity and Democratic Union appealed to the UN Secretary-General, but Western goodwill was outvoted by Soviet and Arab battalions. A Lithuanian boy publicly immolated himself in protest, and in Moscow Andrei Sakharov courageously demanded Baltic self-determination.
Years later I learnt that Arkady Kouk, Soviet agent, had informed MI6 that I was in KGB pay. My favourite World Service producer, German-Jewish devotee of Steinbeck, Heinrich Mann, the Modern Dickens, actually had been.
I met Mr Spender at a party. Without signs of remembering the Paris Conference – who did? – he was friendly, offering me an overcoat, very possibly shoes, then suggesting he recommend me to the CIA-financed Congress of Cultural Freedom. ‘With my name and connections …’
I had little to do but savour old tales: princes devoured by forests, maidens wooed by dragons, oaks rising from sea, the white of an egg finding itself the moon that hatched earth and stars. The Devil’s sons, Malformed, Blind and Lame; the arrow glancing off an iron, oil-black mountain and slaying a hero; the stern warlord seeking his lost home, the youth wresting sword from a rock; the wanderer sad but resolute. They threw long shadows. The Isle of Golden Grass, now the name of a drug-parlour in an American novel; the Northern gods, violent, dishonest, uneasy, bred the creator of the Gestapo, vain and affable Reichsmarschall, the Herr General’s crony.
I was near zero, an extra in an unsuccessful movie. From inertia comes evil.
Café chatter had changed. Less inward, it debated not only the legalization of cannabis but British integration with Europe. Occasionally I envied East Berliners behind their Wall, despite its blood drips. Programmed from above, they had no onus to risk choice, to venture, to think. More often, I was cheered by the strikes and camp unrest reported from the USSR, perhaps still stimulated by the Helsinki Agreement and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Irresolution was resolved when Whitehall terminated our tax concessions, and the Embassy soon closed. No shoes or overcoats arrived, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was mute, and I left for Geneva hoping for work at the Palais des Nations. Despite smooth interviews, BBC credits, Secret Protocol, nothing followed. The UN High Commission for Refugees rejected me as insufficiently experienced. Days became monotonous as the J
et d’Eau, and I flew to Stockholm for a vacation.
In a flat near tidy, wooded Skansen, with its Volkish cottages and farms, old-time dances, the quietude irritated, so that I invented risks, was grateful when the telephone rang and nobody spoke, entered taverns in search of a quarrel. Soon, however, I adapted to a small, gracious city without ghoulish, sodium-lit ring roads and flyovers, brash concrete housing blocks, endless development. Instead, quays, masts, trees, statues, parks, galleries, cinemas. Water induced strict architectural lines and proportion. The countryside seeped into the capital, in parks, small woods, belvederes, fresh vivid air.
I had expected the sexual extravagances of Swedish movies, bizarre as the Devils of Gothland, with leathered skinnuttar roaring through streets clean as Holland, girls prancing nude over midsummer fires, an occasional Strindberg mistaking people for trolls, frantic crayfish festivities, sociological natter humourless and prolonged, sex a cool mode of exchange. All was indeed efficient as a carburettor, the ethos tight but benevolent, oiled by unending skål, delicious smörgåsbord. Perfect schools, perfect health, so that I looked for street signs, ‘Blow Your Nose Now.’ A voucher entitled me to live Interchat with Males and Females in Their Own Homes. Had I been blind, the municipality would have provided a talking parrot. An elderly flower-seller confided her belief that she could be prosecuted for not answering the telephone, thus likely to endanger the Health Service by Anti-Social Behaviour. Instead of Bergman movies, I found Lawrence of Arabia, and How the West Was Won. An agency entrusted me to a cultural guide, who escorted me to Thorwaldsen sculpture, Strindberg paintings stormy as his drama, to Josephsons and Nordstroms, then imitation Cézannes and Picassos. I read Dagerman and Lindegreen novels, in English, and, common tourist at large, sauntered through sunlight into the stillness yet expectancy of Rilke’s roses, drank schnapps, wandered intricate rococo-style pavilions, watched Sunday toy-soldier parades – remembering, without admiring, the Swedish war effort, flunkeydom to the Reich, indifference or worse to Norway and Finland, while dredging heroic memories of Gustav Adolf and Charles XII.
I quickly received a role. As author, traveller, colleague of the renowned Stephen Spender, surely primed with the latest American artistic and liberal fashions, I was welcome in many homes, comfortable, well-stocked vital citadels against winter. A Frau Professor, having been assured that Secret Protocol was the most searching novel of the decade, held a reception for me in an apartment where fittings, audio-machines, plants shone like coffin-plates. Her husband, Herr Senior Engineer, told me that Estonia was very pretty. She herself occupied the Chair of Horticulture as Welfare. Their daughter was foremost in Temperament Sculpture, designed to collapse after five months, to avoid the staleness of Thorwaldsen and Michelangelo.
To escape well-documented information of cybernetics, neutrons, Vietnam, Paul Newman’s eyes and ‘the End of History’, I regularly sought watersides, watching ships leave for islands. The poetry of masts. Contrasting Strindberg’s torments, clouds were fleecy, skies soft blue; flowers striped and frilled, stationed in public places regular as hussars; bronzed swimmers bonding with glassy waves, divers reporting subaqueous realms dazzling as ducal Burgundy.
Swedish silence was graded to new niceties. Silence of water, of a fisherman alone on Mälaren Lake under a red moon, silence of woods lit by midnight sun with rich, damp, green elfin hues, silence of great bells in repose, of a consulting-room after a dreadful verdict. In testing myself against silence, I hoped to retrieve perceptions almost lost since Meinnenberg. Alone, I relived Forest noons, pungencies of bark and mushroom, the gleam of Old Men of the Earth, the dense musk of hay. High Folk obsolete as peruke and quizzing-glass, gulping kvass in the saddle, dancing with servants in Stille Nacht, when a medieval banner depicted the Christ Child clutching a reindeer – an icon that had once fostered belief that Jesus had been suckled by animals.
Fatigue, anxiety, lassitude dropped like towels from such play of light, pagan hedonism, elated bodies. Only my sexuality was out of condition, on hold. In Canada, there had passed a slim Norwegian girl, without tinsel beauty but of Grail magnetism, glowing, so extraordinarily alive that I was content only to observe, like a veteran from campaigns strenuous though futile, like Charles XII.
Swedes, like handsome children slightly overtired, generously eased me into cliques, sailed me to islands of runic stones, antlers nailed above porches, herrings smelted on shores. In seas strewn with sunrise, we all swam naked, laughing, thoughtless, ready for a long day of happy triviality.
By autumn, I was almost nightly guest at dinners with formal toasts, tiresome traps for the novice; at nightclubs, yacht clubs, literary clubs, I was deferred to by Cold War specialists, gossip journalists, even biotechnologists, myself listening more than contributing to quack about Federal Europe, high-tech planning, world health, from those who at elections were too busy or idle to vote. I parried with local movie stars, all identical blondes, usually recovering from plastic surgery and to be met only by candlelight. Discussions wove around such urgencies as the Practicality of Improbability, which sent me back to the sharp scurry of waves, salt breezes, the aftermath of a storm, wash-up of coiled weed, an orange shirt, Coca-Cola bottle, a slab of glass, such debris once, so long ago, messages from Never-Never. I strained towards the frisky blue water around ‘Ogygia’ and to names jagged as pirate teeth – Skagerrak, Cattegat, Hakuyt – a sound from a cliff, like the hum of church-owls in the Manor park.
Inescapable in Stockholm was the Cold War journalist, Herr Doktor Kauffler, proudly declaring his flat was bugged. By whom? By everyone. His smile was rubbery. ‘Sweden’s frail as a meringue. Seas … ringed with atomic mines. The archipelago, covered with the unidentified. To a soldier like yourself’ – his respect rang like a false coin – ‘this is very familiar. You keep watch, you have your weapon primed. But even you may not have informed yourself that they’re scheming to divert the Gulf Stream. Super-hydraulics.’ Pleased, he could have been taking a salute. ‘While our students shirk their Finals, you and I could count the body-bags.’
Another, more popular habitué was the New York novelist originally from Texas, who, flaxen-headed, athletic fellow guests assured me, was hurrying to transform literature. He agreed. ‘These good folk see captions as proper writing. At Yale …’ before producing a notebook in which to scribble my recollections of the white-haired British Poet Laureate murmuring that had he known how to lie his verse would have been better.
The three serious crimes here were to be virgin, black and over thirty. Though greying, I was reprieved by rumours that my German war record was to be subject of a new movie and that a mountainous advance had been offered for my memoirs. Goggle-eyed young and respectful veterans plastered me with questions. How well had I known Goering’s Swedish wife? Was I really involved in a plot against Saigon? I was swiftly recognized as friend of Gene Kelly, quarreller with Gore Vidal, associate of Susan Sontag, for meeting Churchill and Malraux. Did Herr Capote really … ? Was it true that Herr Bellow …? Demands often smothered by an infantile gurgle or singsong joke.
None of this deceived me. With popularity spurious as a Vatican title, I was a transient fad, like Hare Krishna, Democracy without Taxes, Elvis for Pope.
Parties on any impulse were incessant as darkness lengthened: a Feldpartie to honour a Persian cat who received with boredom, exquisite and understandable, a black-pearled collar; a fiesta on the collier moored near the City Hall, for the Nobel Laureates Martinson and Johnson; a gala to applaud Mick Jagger’s lip imprint on linen; a motorboat rally to hear, though briefly, Concrete Poets; a costume-ball at Skansen, its colours under lamplight as if dripping from a Pollock canvas. Parties on skateboards, parties in royal parks and Tivoli towers or swirling on the helter-skelters, frolics in shirts stamped with such texts as India’s Smallpox Kills.
Anna Wilhemson, Professor of Advanced Literature, though more admired for her crème brûlée, entertained freely but enforced such penalties as nursery attire. Here I met
Nadja, in dark-gold gown, with the éclat of an Alpine champion or French beautician, at first glance about twenty-five, at second, beneath very delicate make-up, some years older. She was soon sitting with a younger girl, very close. They ignored the rest of us, sometimes stroking each other’s arms, occasionally kissing, to my unreasonable resentment. The younger was beautiful, Nadja something more, though their collusion was broken by Anna’s ukase. We were all to play Mon Plaisir, no exceptions. Very severe, she arbitrarily paired off men and women to sit for five minutes in silence facing each other. I was allotted Nadja, who had already directed at the Professor a black stare that failed to stun her. I received only a fraction less.
Her ridged, serious face, its contours with that Asiatic hint, packaged between dark flops of hair, black eyes faintly shadowed, still regarded me with horror until, at the reluctant but submissive silence, loosening into sudden mischief. This completed an attraction I could define no more than I could a musical phrase, which it somewhat resembled. Other couples were showing mutual dissatisfaction, even hatred, not soothed by the arrival of the Texan, noisily apologizing for arriving late, at a party to which, we heard later, he had not been invited.
Nadja and I had been directed to chairs at a french window. Surrounded by embarrassed smiles, artificial intensities, we were forced to inspect each other, like fellow prisoners.
Her eyes, dark brown or black, beneath emphatic brows, iris and pupil barely distinguishable, were ominously reserved, unlikely to be irresolute, but were quickly merry. ‘Quel tedium!’ She spoke in what she must have assumed to be a whisper, though it made several look gratefully across at her. Not pausing to acknowledge them, she grabbed my hand, and while Anna dealt uncompromisingly with the Texan we slunk through the window into cold darkness.
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